Advice sought about a portable e-book reader

[AnitaPeterson]

Hi there,

I have avery large collection of e-books, some in .Txt, some as PDF, some in HTML.

My laptop, as reliable as it is, is still a mammoth - heavy and large.

So I'm thinking that one of the new portable gizmos would do the trick.
But I never bothered to pay attention to them, and I'm not sure what the market offers at this point. OK, I know there's a difference between palm and PocketPC, but that's about it.

I'm thinking that the device would have to have some internal memory - to be able to actually store the files, as well as PC connection capabilities - to download and upload content to my main machine.

Also, the screen... are the screens good enough for allowing you to read scores of pages without getting a headache?

What about battery life?

And, do the OS and applications on these portables guarantee compatibility with the above formats, including the fonts? (since I'm multilingual, I also have books with characters specifically used in European languages, like accents and the like)

If anyone can enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.

PS: I'm not posting this in the SFF forum, because there's almost nobody there.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I've only read one ebook on my Dell Axim X3i (a free David Drake novel from baen.com) but it worked well. The 320x240 screen and fonts on Pocket PCs are very legible. Battery life is good, and Dell sells high-capacity super batteries.

If you don't mind spending a bit over $400 you might consider the Axim X50 with its 640x480 resolution. The screen isn't much larger but the extra pixels should help make text even crisper.

What I'd really like though is a 6x9 tablet PC with 800x600 running real Windows, with a low-power Transmeta, Cyrix, or low-clocked P-M and a big battery. Sadly, there aren't any consumer models like this and if they existed would probably sell for $2,000 instead of $600.

 

[newParadigm]

Get an iPod, and get this peice of software called iPod library, if you cant find i can host it on my webpage for a day or so.